CARACAS -- Venezuela said Wednesday it has paid $1.8 billion in compensation to French, Norwegian and Italian oil companies for nationalizing key oil fields in the Orinoco basin in 2006.
France's Total, Norway's Statoil and Italy's ENI gained the settlement after they accepted the book price for the assets Venezuela's state-run PDVSA oil company took over.
America's ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips meanwhile remain in dispute with Venezuela, demanding current market-price values for their assets taken by PDVSA.
ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips took the dispute to international arbitration under a unit of the World Bank, and ExxonMobil has meanwhile asked courts in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles to freeze $12 billion of PDVSA's global assets.
The move, which one court in New York on February 3 affirmed by freezing $300 million of PDVSA assets, has drawn retaliation from Venezuela, which on February 12 suspended oil supplies to ExxonMobil.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened to also cut off oil deliveries to the United States for its public support of ExxonMobil's legal moves, but on Monday he backtracked, saying he would only stop oil shipments if Venezuela came under attack.
On Wednesday, Caracas said it was ready to face ExxonMobil's legal challenges before World Bank mediators and courts in London, New York and the Dutch Antilles.
"It's a fact we have to defend ourselves in the courts," said Deputy Energy Minister Bernard Mommer, who branded ExxonMobil's freeze moves as "reprisals."
Mommer said ExxonMobil so far had managed to freeze only $300 million of a PDVSA subsidiary's assets in the United States, while the main company's assets remain out of reach because PDVSA "benefits from sovereign immunity."
Recalling that ExxonMobil and PDVSA had begun proceedings in 2007 at the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes, Mommer said the US company's asset freeze requests were unjustified "except as acts of reprisal and to create uncertainty."
As to the other companies seeking compensation for Chavez's June 2006 law forcing foreign oil companies to give PDVSA at least a 60 percent share in their Venezuelan operations, Caracas said Wednesday it had settled with three.
Total accepted $834 million in compensation, ENI $700 million and Statoil $266 million.
The total value of foreign oil assets nationalized by Venezuela would amount to some $28 billion in current market value, of which $11.2 billion would correspond to PDVSA and 11.2 billion to multinationals, Swiss investment bank UBS said in a report.
UBS estimates PDVSA's compensation to the multinationals should be around $5.6 billion, although some experts caution it is a calculation wrought with problems.
"When those projects got underway in the 1990s, they were valued at $16 million, when crude oil prices stood at around $15 per barrel compared to today's $100," LatinPetroleum analyst Pietro Pitts told AFP.
"It's difficult to estimate the current net market value of each project," he said, "because only the companies know how much they make from the oil they produce."
